11 Comments:

Households increased by 15,644 or 4.7%.Registered cars and trucks increased by 7,855 or 1.8% (5-year average 09-13).Registered motor vehicles increased by 12,604 or 2.8%.

So, there is some evidence that over a decade the net increase in 4-wheelers is about half the net increase in households. But a corresponding increase in motorized two-wheelers fills a significan part of the gap.

Another way of looking at is that the motor vehicle-to-household ratio has fallen only to 1.34 from 1.37 over 10+ years.

This is surely the direction that the car-haters have been assuring us but the magnitude is pretty insignificant.

Interestingly, pedal-philes when proclaiming dramatic increases in some number of bicycles somewhere never normalize the numbers for population growth, leaving us with a double standard. In any case, given the absolute increase in motor vehicles, reducing vehicle lane miles and parking still makes no sense.

Per capita, cars ARE on the decline. Nevertheless, anyone who sees this data and doesn't conclude that the only solution is more investment in public transit and bike infrastructure is a grade-A moron.

There's no more room on our streets for more cars and parking. The only way to deal with our population increase is to do a better job providing alternatives to private car ownership.

This chart gives actual hard data that is is easy to interpret, unlike the moronic, specious crap streetsblog (and the Nelson\ Nygaard company; do people actually pay them money for these "studies"?) claims to demonstrate, that "Car-Free Households Are Booming in San Francisco."

Unfortunately what seems to be "booming" in San Francisco, given the types in the transpo sector (Weiner, the mayor's advisor, Reiskin, sfplanning, SFMTA board, SPUR, Livable City, etc) is stupidity.

San Francisco has already been turned into a suburban bedroom community and in a decade or so it will be a suburb of Hong Kong.

The anti-car folks like to play with percentages, but the real issue for a city that's relatively small geographically is its carrying capacity in general: How many people and how many motor vehicles can it sensibly handle on city streets even as it takes away street parking and traffic lanes to make bike lanes?

City Hall is limiting access to city streets by motor vehicles as it implements remarkably dumb "smart growth" housing projects: 5,000 new housing units at Parkmerced in a part of town already near gridlock; the Treasure Island project that will allow 19,000 residents there; the UC project (1,000 new residents) on lower Haight Street; and the nearby Market and Octavia project that will bring another 10,000 new residents to that area, including 40-story highrises at Market/Octavia.

Stupid growth projects with inadequate parking and grade-A moron projects to remove parking and travel lanes are all part of the plan to torture residents into abandoning their cars for bicycles. Coercion is the only way to make bicycling more appealing, yet, people still don't convert. They still prefer motorized transit and more often take a bus or tram. Forced religious conversions like this and as practiced by ISIS need equal condemnation!

Anonymous, if released, expect careful timing of a bad news bicycling report. December during holiday season is good for going unnoticed, but so too is summer while people are vacationing and more people are out on bicycles. At earliest, it could be released in May during national bike month, following bike to work week and all the promotion to get people riding with students still in school.